Over the past 24 hours, you may have felt some tremors of high latency and dropped connections as you surfed the internet. Usually these tremors would be nothing to worry about — they’re usually just the standard low-level interference caused by the occasional router reboot or similar — but in this case they’re actually the early rumblings of a much larger networking earthquake that could cause major outages and disruptions across the global internet. You’ve heard of the IPocalypse caused by the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses — now it’s time to learn about the BGPocalypse.

According to Microsoft, if you want to enjoy the best possible Xbox One gaming experience, you should use IPv6. The Xbox One natively supports IPv6, but finding an ISP that will give you an IPv6 connection to the internet is difficult. By using IPv6 on your Xbox One, you should have less latency when playing multiplayer games, any data that you do transmit over the internet should be safer and more private, and in general any connections made by the Xbox One — either to remote servers, or peer-to-peer — should be faster and more responsive.

At CES 2013, a panel of experts on Internet Protocol technology discussed IPv6 and the benefits of having mobile devices use IPv6 instead of IPv4. As it turns out, IPv6’s large addressing range offers some pretty awesome benefits.

Last night, T-Mobile and Samsung pushed out the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update to the Samsung Galaxy S2. Aside from bringing in all the new features of Android 4.0, it also turns it into a fully IPv6 capable device!

Do not adjust your NIC: As of this morning, unbeknownst to you, you might be surfing the IPv6 internet. Your memorable, 4-to-12-digit IPv4 address may have been replaced by a gribbly IPv6 monster, but in a world that has virtually exhausted its IPv4 address pool, and with internet-connected devices expanding exponentially, this is a very good thing.

Building the next internet will require more than just fatter pipes. Better and smarter protocols, improved routing, and smarter applications will all be needed. Fortunately there is a large, concerted effort to tackle current shortcomings in all these areas…